Field of the Invention
This invention is in the field of automated object tracking, in particular in systems and methods for tracking tagged products and materials for various retail, transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing purposes.
Description of the Related Art
Over the last few decades, a significant amount of progress has been made in automated systems and methods to track various labeled objects. This art is useful in many industries. For example, in the retail sectors, many products are now labeled with tags such as bar code tags, or radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. When customers bring their various products to the checkout counter, various sensors, such as bar code readers and RFID tag readers, scan the products, and assign the products to the particular customer's bill. This insures that the customer's bill is accurate, is useful for marketing research, and allows the merchant's computers to automatically monitor changes in the merchant's product inventory.
Such object tagging methods are also popular in many other areas as well, such as manufacturing, where parts and subassemblies for various goods may be tagged and tracked for manufacturing and transportation purposes; and healthcare, where patients themselves may be individually labeled with bar codes to help confirm that they are receiving proper treatment.
Over the past few decades, there have been advances in other types of sensor technology as well. For example it is now common in many industries to install various types of video monitoring sensors for security purposes. For example, in a retail setting, such video sensors can detect shoplifters in action, and the like.
Additionally, as technology has advanced, it is now common for nearly all members of the public to carry various handheld portable computerized devices, such as Smartphones, that often establish various local and long distance wireless links with various local transceivers (e.g. local WiFi transceivers, local Bluetooth® transceivers, cell phone towers, and the like. Indeed, use of various Smartphone apps that trigger when a Smartphone user is near a particular merchant location, and inform the user that the merchant may be offering various coupons of interest, are also now common.
Although various types of sensors and advanced computer technologies are now common in the modern world, nonetheless the problem remains that information obtained by these different sensors often is at least initially stored in different bins or silos. Such information is seldom combined on a real-time basis, at least by automated methods.